The Chevy was brought from a custom chop shop in Florida in the early 90's, The van is actually built in 1985 but has a 1995 front on, Its other main feature is its Huge 5.7 TPI V8 which was taken from a Camaro IROC.

The Project

The Van was brought to replace the previous Earthquake Van which sadly caught fire, The first install took only 6 weeks it had 24 12" subs, running 6k of power run of 20 Optima batterys, this hit around 149 db.

We used the van for a full season.

It was then time to set a new benchmark in the audio world.

It spent the next 12 months in a purpose built workshop in which it had over 50k spent on labour and materials and equipment.

The SPL Build

The first thing was to have a huge 10" square metal grid welded up this was welded to the inner sides and roof, the van was heavily sound proofed with fibreglass walls, Then once it was panelled with 1 inch MDF it was then sealed and the walls were then filled with expanding foam, the walls were then painted with resin and painted, the result was an extremely sterdy interior cab area which would not flex.

The 2 enclosures were built outside the van and each one held 8 15" subs (16 in total), these were then bolted to the van.

Due to the Power Cube enclosures being 2 subs deep we had 2 forms of time alinement to ensure all subs produced there energy at the opening of the box at the same time.

A Perspex divider was made which compressed the rear subs to travel forward faster, the front row were not compressed, this made a huge difference to the output of the SPL.

The second thing is we used a £1500 Rane active crossover with time alinement so we could delay the front row of subs this made a further increase in SPL.

Each 15" sub had its own 1000watt amp which we had seperate controls for in the cabin area were we could monitor the amps voltage and protection circuits.

In total the van had 17 amplifers this used a huge amount of power which was backed up with 18 Stinger Batterys charged by the 2 Huge 270 amp stinger alternators.

THE SOUND QUALITY BUILD

The Van was not only built to be loud but to also have amazing sound quality.

The Eton speakers were mounted in perspex molded enclosures in the floor these were run from 2 Class A amplifers which ran through an amazing maze of passive crossovers using over 200 compontants which was designed by Alberto Lopez, the results were a perfect score every time.

THE SOURCE

The head unit was a £900 Eclipse (Fujitsu Ten) head unit which we dismantled into 3 pieces the display was shown through a perspex window, the buttons were intergrated into the armrest and the cd shuttle was mounted to the side of the centre consol, the sound then ran through a pair of modified £3000 Rane 30 band Eq's.

THE AMPS

The 2 amp racks holding the 16 bass amps in the rear motorised out the rear of the van by 15" and were controlled by the Clifford Remote.

The modified sound quality amplifers were mounted in the side sliding door area along with there own batterys and the Rane Processors.